


Each new day we limp forward

by ChronicBookworm



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family Bonding, Friendship, Gen, Post-Episode: s05e22 The Gift, Sister-Sister Relationship, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26934832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChronicBookworm/pseuds/ChronicBookworm
Summary: The tower collapses, and both Buffy and Dawn fall into Glory’s portal. They have only each other to rely on as they try to find a way to survive in an unwelcoming barren hell dimension and somehow find their way home.
Relationships: Buffy Summers & Dawn Summers
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17
Collections: Fic In A Box





	Each new day we limp forward

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nowrunalong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowrunalong/gifts).



> Title from January Drought by Eddie Matikiti

“The hardest thing in the world is to live in it,” Buffy said, her hands on Dawn’s shoulders. “Be brave. Live.”

It was all so very clear to her, what she had to do. How she could save the world, how she could save Dawn. How she could pass on the burden of the Slayer to the next one after her. It felt like a relief. Like a benediction. She didn’t have to choose between Dawn and the world. She didn’t have to let her sister jump to her death. She could offer herself instead. She took a few steps towards the edge of the ledge, picking up the pace as she went, and flew through the air, arms outstretched.

As she jumped off, the tower buckled and wobbled precipitously behind her, before starting to slowly sink to the ground on its side. She twisted her head back just in time to see Dawn careening off the same ledge she had just jumped from. They hurtled towards the portal, Buffy in a determined swan dive, Dawn in a panicked flailing.

There wasn’t much she could do in the air – she could try to break Dawn’s fall, but at this altitude, that would hardly be enough to save her. Still, she twisted in mid-air and angled herself beneath Dawn. They were both going to die, and there was nothing she could do about it, but even in death, Buffy would go to any lengths to protect her sister. They fell, bathed in the white light of the crackling portal. The air was filled with electricity. It was burning hot, and yet they weren’t harmed. The light was blinding. All she saw was white.

They landed with a thump. Buffy’s arm instinctively went up to cradle Dawn as they impacted on the ground. Every muscle hurt, and despite her Slayer toughness, she thought she would be one giant bruise tomorrow. She couldn’t imagine what Dawn must be feeling.

She‘d failed. She was meant to save the world, and she’d let the apocalypse start. She was meant to protect Dawn, and she’d let Dawn fall. Death was her gift, and she hadn’t even managed to give it properly.

“You all right, Dawn?” she asked. She had more important things to worry about than her self-pity right now.

“I’m sorry!” Dawn said.

“What for? _I’m_ the one who should be sorry.”

“You jumped to protect me and I couldn’t even stay on the ledge,” Dawn said, a note of hysteria in her voice.

“It’s okay,” Buffy said, stroking her hair and making shushing noises at her. “The entire thing collapsed, it wasn’t your fault. I’m the one who failed, you did nothing wrong. We’ll get through this together, you and me.”

She kept up a litany of calming and soothing words, like she had when Dawn was much, much younger and crying because she fell down and hurt herself. She supposed it wasn’t much different in essence, only in scale.

When Dawn had calmed down a bit, they sat up to get their bearings. Buffy was already certain that they weren’t in their own world – it was too quiet. There was no distant hum of traffic on the roads, no sirens, no sounds of battle or the aftermath of battle, no voices of Glory’s mental patients or their friends. If they had landed near Glory’s tower, at least one of the Scoobies would have checked on them by now. Besides, she could feel she was lying on some kind of rocky, dusty, uneven ground, not the concrete or crates around the tower.

“Are we dead?” Dawn asked. “Is this hell? Or is this Glory’s world?”

“It could be neither. Didn’t Anya say there were millions of dimensions out there?”

“I hope it’s the world without shrimp,” Dawn said. “I always wanted to go there. Do you think the ecosystem would be completely different if there was no shrimp, or would it be more or less the same, just with some other sea creature filling that void in the ecosystem?”

Buffy had no idea, biology had not been her favorite subject at school (what had been, really, aside from gym?), but she was happy to let Dawn speculate as long as it kept her mind occupied and helped her not freak out, while Buffy took in their surroundings and tried to come up with a plan.

The world they were in was overwhelmingly grey. The sky above them was overcast, to the point where their shadows were so faint on the ground that they were almost impossible to make out, and they were standing on dusty, grey, rocky plains as far as the eye could see. The wind howled, and occasionally whipped up a dust cloud that got in their eyes and mouth, with an ashy taste. There was an acrid, almost burning smell coming from all around them, possibly – probably – from the grey dust itself. Dawn’s dress was the easiest to tear, so they each tore up a strip of the bottom to use as a makeshift facial cover to prevent the dust getting into their mouths and noses. She was still wearing the dress Glory had given her for the ritual, with slashes on the stomach and arms where Doc had cut her, the rest of the dress coated with blood and clinging to her stomach. Buffy didn’t have any bandages, but she had to try and stop the blood flow somehow. The cuts were shallow, so they’d scab over quickly – there was no risk that Dawn would bleed to death, as long as she was careful not to open them up again. Buffy was still in her white sweater and grey pants, although her sweater had been stained by Dawn’s blood. That was going to be a nightmare to get out – it was probably unsalvageable, unless she could find cold water to soak it in sometime soon. Somehow, that seemed important, that she get Dawn’s blood out of her sweater. She had greater things to worry about – food, drinking water, shelter, safety from whatever lurked in this world, but she also needed to not be wearing Dawn’s blood.

There was a mountain chain up ahead, towering over the landscape, which made for as good a landmark as any. There was no water in sight. On her person, she had four stakes, three knives, and a bottle of holy water.

They set off in the direction of the mountains, Dawn leaning on Buffy. She wasn’t complaining, even though Buffy knew her stomach must be paining her. She was so proud of her, how she had pulled herself together after her very understandable freak-out, how mature she was being about it. She realized Dawn was only one year younger than the age Buffy had been when she was called as the Slayer. God. Way to make her feel old. Dawn had always seemed so much younger than Buffy had been, but she supposed she hadn’t always been Miss Maturity either, and when put in a high-stakes situation, fourteen-year-old Dawn was doing just as well as fourteen-year-old Buffy would have done. It made her see Dawn in a new light, not just the little sister any more.

“Oh my God, what was that?” Dawn yelped.

Buffy looked at where she was pointing, and it took her a moment to see it – some kind of snake slithering towards them. It was grey, patterned with tiny flecks of lighter and darker grey so it blended in against the rock and was almost invisible, and it was silent as it carved its way through the dust.

Buffy took a decisive step forward and brought her boot down on it. It gave way beneath her foot with a squelch, and when she lifted her foot, the snake was lying still on the ground with a slimy outpouring in the middle where she had squelched it. She took out a stake and lifted it up with that. It had no eyes, no mouth, no discernable features that she could see other than just the grey skin. She tossed the disgusting thing away from them and carried on walking.

As they walked through the monotonous landscape, Buffy had plenty of time for reflection, while keeping her eyes peeled for more of those snake things. She wondered what the others would think, how worried they’d be. If they’d try to get them back, or if they thought Buffy and Dawn were dead. She wondered what they’d do when they couldn’t find either of their bodies, how panicked they’d be. If Tara was going to be ok – she knew Willow had managed to weaken Glory, which hopefully should mean that Tara would be back to normal. So Willow would have Tara, and Xander had Anya. They’d be all right. But that left Giles with nobody to care about and lean on. Would he stick around for the other Scoobies, or would he go back to England?

“My blood can open portals, right?” Dawn said out of the blue.

“That’s not happening,” Buffy said, knowing where that train of thought would lead her. She had briefly thought about it, but discarded it almost immediately – and not just because the thought of deliberately making Dawn bleed made her feel queasy. The Key caused all dimensions to bleed together and cascade in on themselves, which meant even if they did open a portal, there would be no way to guarantee it would be back to Earth. Besides, there was the whole “the portal closes when the blood stops flowing” thing. She had gone to all this trouble avoiding that in the first place, she wasn’t going to deliberately put herself in the position where Dawn might die. Not again. Not ever.

“Yeah, I guess it’s only when the stars are right,” Dawn said. “Once every thousand years or so.”

“Guess we’re stuck here for a millennium,” Buffy said.

“Hope you packed lots of books. A millennium is a long time, wouldn’t want to get bored,” Dawn said with a forced lightness to her tone. She was trying to lighten the mood, to distract them from the seriousness of the situation.

“We should have had that deck of cards we took in the camper van,” Buffy said, going with it.

They walked, and walked, and walked. The mountains seemed to be still as far away as when they’d started. Eventually Dawn wasn’t able to walk any further, so Buffy carried her on her back for a few more hours while she dozed. Buffy, too, was human. She, too, grew tired needed to sleep eventually. As the sky turned from a light grey to a dark charcoal, Buffy put Dawn down. There was no shelter, nowhere to hide, no vegetation that could provide any kind of cover. They sat in the open air, in the middle of the plain. Buffy took first watch, and woke Dawn in the pitch darkness, a few hours before the sun rose, so she could get a few hours of sleep. If the sun would rise at the same schedule as on Earth, which wasn’t a given in any way.

As the sky lightened, Dawn gently jostled Buffy awake again, and they set off towards the mountains. The mountains towered over them, and Buffy hoped they could arrive later that day, or the day after. She didn’t like sleeping out in the open, with no cover at her back; it set off all her instincts to be wary and alert. She wasn’t sure if those were Slayer instincts or remnants from humanity’s days as cave-dwellers. She wished she had more weapons that just her stakes or knives. The troll hammer, for instance. She could go for that. Or just an axe, she’d be happy with just a regular axe. Something she could swing at anyone that threatened them.

“If there are enemies here, you should train me,” Dawn said.

“What?”

“I can fight, if you teach me properly. I’ve watched you. I’ve learned, and I can learn more.”

Her first thought was to say no, because Dawn was still too young, but hadn’t she just reflected last night over how she’d been essentially Dawn’s age when she started? She’d had the Slayer mojo to give her a boost, sure, but it wasn’t like she’d been a lot more mature than Dawn was now. A bit the opposite, in fact.

“Sure.”

“You mean it?”

“I do. I think it’s our only chance to survive out here.”

She handed Dawn one of her knives.

“Don’t cut yourself.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.”

Dawn was weaker today than yesterday – they hadn’t had anything to eat, or to drink, and the arid air made their throats dry out. Buffy had woken up a couple of times with intense hunger cramps, but she was past that stage, and didn’t feel hungry at all now. She knew enough to know that that was hardly good.

They split the bottle of holy water. It was maybe a mistake, since there was no Church or priest around to bless more for her, but they needed to drink to survive. They’d deal with the lack of holy water later, if it became a problem. Most of the problems Buffy tended to solve with holy water could also be solved with a wooden stake, unlike Willow’s spells and rituals, so hopefully they wouldn’t miss it too much when it came down to it. She was more worried about finding more drinking water, to be honest. That was their first worry – if they didn’t find any water soon, the issue of whether it was blessed or not would be entirely moot.

There was a dragon soaring above the mountains.

“Uh, do we really want to be heading towards the giant scary dragon?” Dawn asked.

“It’s dragons or dusty wasteland – take your pick.”

“I think I might actually prefer the wasteland. Wasteland doesn’t want to eat me.”

“Tough,” Buffy said. “You also can’t eat wasteland, so dragon it is.”

“Hope it’s friendly,” Dawn said with a nervous laugh.

“Didn’t you always say you wanted a pet?” Buffy quipped.

If worst came to worst, they could try to kill the dragon and eat it, but she wasn’t very optimistic about their chances in that fight. She was more hoping that there was something there that could sustain it – some source of water and of food. That the dragon was a sign of life. Hopefully it didn’t eat rock and drink dust, though who knew with demons. Giles might have known, but Giles was not here.

They reached the foot of the mountains at the end of the day, and settled in to sleep in a quiet, tucked away corner between two rocks. Buffy’s lizard brain felt better when they had some cover, and enemies were less likely to approach from any direction. She knew that they needed to find water the next day. One day had been okay, two days was stretching it, but three days with no more than half a bottle of water would mean they were in deep trouble.

The next day, they climbed up into a slight valley between two mountains, and made their way across. They started seeing the occasional shrub, and on the other side there was a fair amount of vegetation – mostly shrubs, but also the occasional tree. That boded very well. If there were plants, there should be water. They weren’t green, rather muted greys and browns, like everything else in this world, but it was better than nothing. Hopefully they were edible – either to humans or to something that was edible to humans. She suspected that their options for fine dining would be severely constrained here. Also their option for lazy dining. There was no Doublemeat Palace here.

Something moved in the corner of her eye, and she pushed Dawn back down behind a rock, pressing herself fight against the cliff edge of the mountain, feeling the spikes dig into her back. She could vaguely see them, and thought they couldn’t see her, unless they had laser eyes or something (she’d seen weirder). There were six of them, walking along. Humanoid, two legs, two arms, head, the whole shebang. Dark grey, almost charcoal, and wrinkly, with an elephant face – trunk and tusks and all. Except they had no ears at all, which was a shame, since it was the large floppy ears that made elephants cute. These just looked creepy. They had language, and tools, wore pelts as clothing, and worked together in a pack. She could almost imagine they would fit in among Neanderthals, if it wasn’t for the part where they were half elephant. But – and this was important – they carried waterskins. She gestured for Dawn to stay where she was, hidden, and keep her knife handy, then Buffy slowly and silently crept out of their hiding place. She followed the demons at a distance, keeping low, keeping hidden, and making sure that whenever one of them turned back, she was pressed against the mountain. Her white shirt had taken on a lot of the grey dust of the place, which was good, and if she’d had time she would have rolled even more in. It hurt to ruin one of her favorite sweaters, but she’d rather do that than die. The sweater was already ruined – she didn’t know if she could wear it again without thinking of the day she allowed Dawn to fall through the portal to Hell.

The elephant demons had a camp. They had tents made of animal hides, a fire in the middle, and deep dike with completely vertical edges dug around it. They also had water, and food. Buffy wasn’t quite sure what the dike was meant to repel, but it was narrow enough that she could jump over it easily. She landed in a crouch behind one of the tents. She peered round. It was empty. Even better, there was an almost full waterskin in it, as well as a spear, and a small metal pot filled with cut-up pieces of meat. She took all of it, and made a quick escape, back to where Dawn was waiting anxiously. Luckily, Buffy was agile and silent. Food and water sorted, even if they couldn’t always steal from the demons.

A little more reconnaissance revealed that there was a small lake nearby, fed by a stream where the demons got their water. Buffy was very glad she’d had the foresight to swipe the pot – it meant they had something to boil the water with. The spear helped with hunting as well. They slept between the same rocks as the second night for a few nights in a row, before they discovered a small cave set into the mountain. The opening was quite small, and they had to crawl to get in and out, but as long as nothing came in behind them, it was also a good defensive feature. The demon elephants wouldn’t fit in, at least.

“Do you think this is some sort of demon cave?” Dawn asked.

“Finders keepers,” Buffy shrugged. There were no bone piles, the dust lay evenly and undisturbed on the floor of the cave, not swept away anywhere where someone had slept. They may just have been lucky enough to find an abandoned cave.

They settled in. Buffy gave Dawn one of the axes she’d stolen from the demons, and set about teaching her how to defend herself. She’d watched Buffy and had the basics down, but she was still inexperienced, lacking muscle memory or strength. She kept dropping her elbow and her stance was unsteady, but gradually, as they sparred, she improved. Buffy had never had to teach anyone before – fighting came naturally to her, and the Scoobies had helped her with her training but not been interested in learning to fight themselves, and she found that teaching Dawn helped her improve her own form as well, since she was more aware of how she moved when she had to put it in words or show something to Dawn in slow motion. It wasn’t quite as good as being trained by Giles, but it was better than nothing.

This dimension sucked. It sucked that they were on their own, it sucked that there was so little water, it sucked that everything was brown or grey, it sucked that the only life was unfriendly demons, it sucked that they had to sleep on the stone hard (literally) floor of a cave, there were no conveniences, no amenities, keeping up with hygiene was difficult, they smelled, their clothes were dirty and torn and none of them had any replacements, the food was bland and chewy, and if they didn’t hunt it themselves they didn’t eat. But. They were alive. They had food. They had water. They had a relatively safe place to sleep. They had each other. It could have been so much worse.

The cave was on the side towards the wasteland, which Buffy was glad for. The elephant demons rarely had reason to go over the mountains there, it seemed, because why would they?

One morning there was a commotion outside their cave – it sounded like it was on the other side of the mountain, but it was so loud the sound reached all the way round to them. Buffy gestured at Dawn to stay put, and snuck out to watch. There were two types of demon engaged in battle – the elephant demons (Dawn called them demophants, which Buffy supposed was a decent enough name. Better than anything Xander would have come up with, at least), and another type that she hadn’t seen before – they looked like giant caterpillars, with lots of tiny legs in proportion to their body, which was made up of slimy-looking segments. The segments were colored in every color of the rainbow, the only splash of bright color Buffy had seen since they arrived in this hell dimension. That didn’t bode well – the only creatures that didn’t have camouflage were those that didn’t need it because their other defenses were strong enough that it didn’t matter if they were spotted. These creatures had some kind of poisonous spit that they excreted, which stunned or paralyzed the demophants. The demophants worked in teams, but the caterpillar demons were stronger individually – it took three of four demophants to take down a single caterpillar demon, and from what she had seen of them, they didn’t have the kind of numbers necessary to truly win a fight – there were some ten or fifteen able fighters, plus a few more too young or too old. It ended in something like a stalemate, both sides retreating to lick their wounds, and Buffy had a greater insight into what kinds of life existed here and what it could do.

They took watches at night, with a small fire in the cave – close enough to the exit that the smoke could escape and they wouldn’t suffocate, far enough in and hidden by a rock that its flickering light wasn’t a beacon to anything that might be prowling around out there. Buffy took the longer watch – she was able to go with less sleep, and her senses were more honed, supernaturally heightened and used to six years of being on alert. But she missed the grey snake that crawled into the cave. She didn’t see it slither across the ground, and before she knew it, it was wrapped around her throat. She scratched at it, trying to dislodge it, to yank it away from her, but its grip on her neck was too strong. She reached out for her knife beside her, to stab at it, but her fingers kept gripping empty rock and dust. She was suffocating. In her flailing, she managed to kick Dawn, who sat up with a start, hand going to the knife she kept beside her.

“Hold still,” she said, and Buffy tied to calm herself down, stop ineffectively scramble at the thing around her neck. It was hard to think, she felt herself getting dizzy and weak.

Dawn aimed carefully, and slashed with her knife. Buffy could see her being careful not to cut her in her over eagerness, but she wished she’d hurry up, because she wasn’t sure how long she’d be conscious.

The knife did nothing, bounced off the skin of the snake. Buffy wheezed, and she could see the panic rising in Dawn’s eyes. She tried not to panic herself.

Dawn grabbed a small branch from the fire, yelping as she tried to keep it in her hands. She held the fire to the creature, and miracle of miracles, it let go with a spasm and fell to the ground. Buffy grabbed the knife Dawn had left on the ground and drove it down into the creature. It went in easily.

“Are you ok?” Dawn asked, crouching down where Buffy was still on her knees, holding her knife over the snake thing in case it moved again.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Buffy said. “That was some quick thinking. You saved my life there, I think.”

“Only 499 times to go before we’re even,” Dawn said with a crooked grin.

“The first 450 were a free sample,” Buffy replied. “Now we know fire can weaken it, so we should definitely make sure to always have a fire going.”

“I wish I had a lighter,” Dawns said, and Buffy glared at her. They didn’t use the word wish for frivolous things. They didn’t use it for serious things, either, come to think of it. Anya’s stories had frightened that out of them quite successfully.

“Should have had a teenage rebellion and taken up smoking,” Buffy joked.

“I’ll remember you said that when we get home. It’s not too late,” Dawn replied.

Buffy finally relaxed.

“I think it’s dead for real,” she said.

“The pool of grey goo is a clue,” Dawn said. “Do you think it’s edible?”

They looked at the oozing grey goo, and made horrified faces at each other. Food was scarce, but they weren’t _that_ desperate.

“I’m gonna go with ‘no’,” Buffy said. “I don’t think it would taste good, even to you.”

“Cheap shot,” Dawn said.

“A cheap shot is still a shot,” Buffy rejoined, and Dawn stuck out her tongue at her. They tossed the grey thing out of the cave, and settled in for the rest of the night.

Dawn had picked up on a surprising amount by watching Buffy, and now Buffy had the time and opportunity to teach her more, about how to fight, hunt, and sneak. They practiced gymnastics together and sparred using weapons stolen from the demophants. They hadn’t invented range weapons yet, aside from spears, but those were kind of a ‘one and done’ type of thing. Buffy managed to fashion a rudimentary slingshot using the elastic of her pants, keeping her pants up with string. It wasn’t ideal, and she wouldn’t be seen dead in it in Sunnydale or anywhere on Earth, but being seen dead in any kind of clothing was less of a concern here. The slingshot would do in a pinch, and she had more elastic when she’d worn that piece out, but still, she missed her crossbow.

They worked out how the ecology of the hell dimension worked – with the caterpillar demons (named catermons by Dawn) engaged in a cyclical battle with the demophants, and both species were afraid on the grey stranglers – that was the purpose of the strange vertical dikes around the demophants’ camp, since the stranglers couldn’t cross them. Unfortunately, even as strong as Buffy was, there was no way in hell (literally) she would be able to dig a dike like that out of the solid rock entrance to the cave. Their cave had a lot of good protections, against the weather, against dragons and catermons and demophants, against all the other countless beasts in this dimension, but not the grey stranglers. And there were a lot of beasts – demons with dripping fangs, long claws of black gaping holes where their mouth should be. Demons on two legs, on four legs, on six or more, or with wings. Demons with fur, demons with wrinkly, leathery skin, demons with slimy skin, gelatinous demons. Some of them were edible. Some were not. Most of them wanted to eat Buffy and Dawn.

She understood why everyone seemed to fear the grey stranglers. They were almost impossible to spot in advance, before leaping up and constricting your airways. On the ground, they were weak and squishy, but when they were in contact with something, their bodies were locked up, impenetrable and almost impossible to dislodge. A flicker of movement in the corner of your eyes was often the only warning you got that there was one in the vicinity, and they started reacting to every hint of movement. They learned to keep out of each other’s blind spots after on too many close calls of Buffy almost attacking Dawn. Dawn was also as wary, and her reactions were being honed. She had a surprisingly strong leg, Buffy discovered, as Dawn drove her foot straight onto Buffy’s.

“Sorry, sorry!” she said immediately, as Buffy yelped and tried to massage her foot through her almost worn-through boot.

“No, it’s good. If I was a strangler, I would strangle no more. You’re doing good, Dawnie.”

“Really? Thanks!” Dawn said, a pleased smile creeping up on her face, before shaking her head slightly. “I mean – sure. No big.”

She shrugged, trying for nonchalant. Buffy let her have her dignity. She was a kind older sister, and would only bring it up to tease her if she was really annoyed with her. So, probably not until tomorrow.

Buffy and Dawn always had a fire going in the cave, and a pile of sticks ready to jam into the fire and then onto the strangler, but there was always the worry that they wouldn’t be quick enough, or what if it happened when they were out and didn’t have access to fire. Carrying a torch drew the attention of the demophants, who were not friendly. Maybe it was because Buffy and Dawn had stolen their tools, or maybe they were just unfriendly by nature. Buffy didn’t know which it was, and she didn’t particularly care. All that mattered were that they weren’t.

She had considered an alliance with either one of the intelligent species. The demophants had seemed more likely at the start – they were more like Buffy and Dawn, in that they were humanoid in shape, had opposable thumbs, had an organized society and used tools, but Buffy was experienced enough to know that sometimes, the ones that looked the most human were the most monstrous. She had tried to get one of them on their own, to even the odds if things went badly, but they had no shared language, and Buffy never got close enough to make friendly overtures before they attacked on sight, probably thinking she looked like a tasty snack. She quickly disabused them of that notion, and ever since, they’d tried to kill her whenever they saw her and she tried to kill them. Just like in good old Sunnydale. The catermons were better – they were happy to ignore Buffy and Dawn as long as they didn’t threaten them, but there was no talk of an alliance, and they weren’t friends. Still, if it came to a fight between them, Buffy knew which side she was on. But her strategy was mainly to stay out of the way – getting involved seemed like a very good way to shorten her own life expectancy.

“This hell dimension sucks,” Buffy said, when they were stuck inside the cave during a dust storm. The wind was howling outside, and even Buffy would have a hard time keeping her balance against the force of this wind, if she stepped outside. There was almost zero visibility, as the wind whipped up clouds of dust around the cave, blocking even the dim light from the grey sky from filtering through. They struggled to keep the fire going – every now and again the dust would blow in and almost smother it, and it got into their eyes and made them itch and water. They had cloth tied around their noses and mouths, which helped a bit, but they would still spend the next hour or so after the storm abated spitting out dust and trying to hydrate to get rid of the parched dryness in their throats.

“I’m sorry we’re stuck here,” Dawn said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s my blood. I’m the Key. I brought us here, but I can’t bring us back,” she said, choking back tears.

“No, Dawnie. It’s really not your fault. If you have to blame someone, blame the monks who put the Key into your blood. Blame Glory for organizing the ritual, blame Doc for actually making the cut. Blame Willow and Giles for not figuring it out quicker. Blame us for not having a plan that was good enough. Blame me for failing to rescue you in time.”

She crawled over to where Dawn was sitting and pulled her into a hug.

“But don’t you dare blame yourself. There was no way you could have stopped it, it’s not your fault.”

“Still feels like it, though.”

“I know.”

Buffy knew what that was like, blaming herself for something she couldn’t have stopped. In this case though, she truly was at fault. She was meant to protect Dawn and she had failed. All she could do now was to try and make up for it in any way she could.

They formed something like a two-person hunter-gatherer society, with Buffy more as the hunter and Dawn more as the gatherer. Except they went out together – they’d thought it over, and the risk of leaving the cave unattended for anyone to come in and take was more acceptable than the risk of either of them running into trouble outside the cave with no backup. So even though Buffy was better at hunting and Dawn better at gathering, Buffy was there to offer protection and extra muscle when they gathered, and Dawn was there to help haul the catch back to the cave, to be backup and distraction. Sometimes, she was even bait – Buffy hated putting her in danger, but they did need to eat. The greyish-brown shrub leaves were edible, but didn’t taste nice. They had some berries, also brown – they were edible when they were light brown, almost golden, but when they turned darker and ripened into maroon, they caused nausea and puking, something they learned from experience. At least they didn’t die from it, and now they knew.

They learned to time getting water from the little lake between when the catermons and the demophants did. The grey stranglers were always there, though, which made getting water a risky endeavor, and they never knew when the dragon would decide it was thirsty or fancied a swim.

Their most common prey was grey-furred six-legged mammal, about the size of a large dog – it was small enough that they could lug it back to the cave fairly easily, and large enough that they got more than one day’s meals out of it. There was one problem, though. It tasted like slightly sweetened sawdust.

“Did you have to kill another dogopede?” Dawn whined, as they got it back to the cave to skin it and cook it. “Couldn’t you get something else? _Anything_ else?”

She kept up a steady litany of whines all through prep, until Buffy finally had enough.

“I don’t like it either,” she said. “But it’s food. If you don’t like it, you can go find your own food, and not moan about how I do it. See for yourself how easy it is to keep us both fed.”

Buffy regretted what she’d said almost as soon as she said it. Dawn’s face fell.

“I do help,” she said, sounding hurt and upset. “I gather leaves and berries, I go after water, I cook, I help you hunt. Maybe it wasn’t my stone or my spear or my axe that killed it, but I was there all the time as well.”

They were both hungry, and tired, and sick of each other, but Buffy was older, so she should have better control of herself.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I’m more than just a burden.”

“I know.”

Dawn was silent for a bit.

“I’m sorry too. I know I was being annoying. Dogopede is better than nothing, and I know it’s not easy.”

“Well, next time I’ll bring back something better. How about a nice green slug?”

The green slugs were actually tasty – the only thing in this dimension they’d found that was, if you could get over the frankly disgusting texture of them. They could be found around the lake, but killing them meant hanging around there for longer than they were usually comfortable with, and one slug could only feed one of them. Dawn smiled.

“Next time, we’ll kill a green slug. Two, even. One for you and one for me.”

Their new luxuries to look forward to: a green slug each. Hilton Hotel this dimension was not.

It is was just Buffy on her own, she might have given up, given in to the bleakness of the world around them, with no purpose but to survive, not that she had failed in the task to protect the world (she wondered what the Scoobies or the Council would do without a Slayer, if they’d get Faith out of jail, or if they’d carry on without one). If she was just living for herself, she might not have seen the point in it. But she’d told Dawn that the hardest thing in the world was to live in it. She’d told her to be brave and live. It didn’t matter that she’s said that when she thought she was dying and Dawn wasn’t – now they were both here, and Dawn had to live, so Buffy had to, too.

“We’re almost like Robinson Crusoe, or the Swiss family Robinson,” Dawn commented when they were holed up in their little cave. “Intrepid explorers lost in a foreign place, finding shelter and food and avoiding predators. Using our wits to survive for ourselves when we’re the only humans around.”

“Forgive me if I’m wrong,” Buffy said. “But weren’t the Swiss family Robinson stranded on a tropical island with both penguins and buffalo?”

Dawn shrugged.

“You can’t have everything in life.”

She tensed up, and Buffy looked around to see what she’d noticed. A flicker of movement in the corner of her eye had both Buffy and Dawn scrambling up. Buffy stepped out to where she thought she’d seen it, but her foot came down hard on solid rock, sending a thin cloud of dust up around her boot. Dawn lunged with a knife and drove it right into the grey strangler’s soft body – it hadn’t tensed up to pounce at their throats yet. Thankfully – they’d both had a couple of close calls recently. Maybe the stranglers had learnt that there were people in the cave, but it was also possible that they were just always around, and whichever cave they set up camp in, there would be grey stranglers there.

“Good job,” she said.

Dawn lifted the strangler up with her knife.

“I don’t think the Swiss family Robinson had to deal with these,” she said.

“Their loss,” Buffy replied. “Every family needs a bonding activity.”

They kept each other’s spirits up with wry humor and steely determinism, not allowing the other to give in to fatalism. They took it in turns to be the strong one, and Buffy was so, so glad that Dawn was strong enough to do that for her, that it wasn’t just Buffy looking after Dawn. She was also sorry that Dawn had to grow up so fast, that she didn’t get the chance to be just a sheltered teenager the way Buffy never did. She’d almost been looking forward to living vicariously through Dawn and getting the normal high school experience, but even if they were to get back home in time for Dawn’s school year, she thought that chance was shot to hell. There was no way Dawn could go back to being a normal high-schooler after this.

“You know one good thing about the food here?” Buffy said as they were snacking on their green slugs – she still had the bruises from where she’d had to fight off a grey strangler to get them, but it was worth it.

“There’s no sugar so we won’t rot our teeth?” Dawn suggested, mainly as a joke, Buffy thought. She’d never thought that Dawn could suggest that no sugar was a positive.

“Well, there’s that,” she agreed. “But do you know what else?”

“What?”

“I don’t have to watch you do unspeakable things to pizza.”

She jostled Dawn gently in the side. Dawn grinned back at her.

“My pizzas are amazing, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re the one with no sense of adventure.”

“Sure, that’s what I’m lacking. A sense of adventure,” she said, with a pointed look at the weapons lined up against the wall, well within reach of both of them if they were needed.

“You’re old and boring,” Dawn said.

“Well, now. Them’s fighting words.”

Buffy won the ensuing wrestling match – there was no way she couldn’t. As they lay in the cave, draped across each other, watching the grey sky darken, Buffy reflected on the remarkable human capacity to get used to pretty much anything.

For all she had done to protect Dawn, for all she had spent pretty much all of last year focused on Dawn, trying to keep her safe from Glory, looking after her after Mom had died, making sure she was all right, they hadn’t actually bonded that much. Buffy had been busy with college, with Glory, with sorting out everything that had come from losing a parent, and before that with Slayer stuff, with high school and her friends. But now, when it was just her and Dawn and nobody else to hang out with, she discovered that Dawn was actually pretty cool, when she wasn’t being annoying. She knew that before, of course, but it had been more of an abstract knowledge. She thought that even if Dawn was five years younger than her, they’d still get along and like each other even if they weren’t sisters.

Their new reality sucked monkey balls, but Buffy was learning how to get along and make the best of it, and she thought Dawn was too. Until she came into the cave after doing private business (they had a designated spot for that sort of thing far enough away that it wouldn’t bother them or attract nasties to their cave, but close enough that they could still hear each other and come to each other’s aid if needed), to find Dawn with a bloodied knife in her hands, thin cuts all along her stomach.

Buffy was by her side before she even realised she’d moved, yanking the knife away from her.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“I want to go home,” Dawn said, verging on tears.

“This isn’t the way, Dawnie,” Buffy said, trying to gentle her voice and not let her horror show, to be what Dawn needed her to be right in this moment. She could deal with blaming herself for not seeing that Dawn was on the verge of a breakdown later.

“I want to go _home_ ,” Dawn repeated.

“It won’t work,” Buffy said. “Not for another 100 years, and even then, there’s no guarantee we won’t end up in another Hell dimension. We talked about this, remember?”

“I don’t care,” Dawn said sullenly. “I hate it here!”

“I know. We’ll find our way home, I swear. We will. But this isn’t the way. We’ll find another way.”

She had no idea where, or how, but for Dawn, she would. She would tear down the barriers between the worlds, punch her way through every single Hell dimension there was to get back to Sunnydale. For Dawn.

“You don’t even care,” Dawn said. “It’s your fault we’re here. If you had bothered to find me before the ritual started, we wouldn’t be here.”

“I looked for you. I did everything I could to save you.”

“Well, it wasn’t enough!”

“I always looked after you,” Buffy said, angry and losing control of her temper. “You have no idea what I went through to get you back. I _always_ fought like hell for you, and you _always_ got into trouble again. Once, just _once_ , maybe you could show a little gratitude for everything I’ve done.”

She saw Dawn’s stricken look, and regretted the words as soon as she’d said them. But it was too late. Dawn was already out of the cave before Buffy’s legs got unstuck. She was faster than Dawn, but there were so many rocks around – the mountains were full of nooks and crannies to hide in, and if she yelled, she’d bring the dragon down on herself, or, worst case scenario, on Dawn.

She spent a full day clambering all over the rocks, above and below the cave, to the east and the west, cursing herself for saying such thoughtless things, cursing Dawn for running off, cursing Glory for landing them here, cursing the First Slayer for handing down such a shitty destiny. She was out of her mind with worry. Anything could have happened to Dawn. She’d run off with no water, no food, no weapons. She was alone and defenseless in this world where pretty much everything wanted to eat them.

There was a flicker in the corner of her eye, and she stepped out to step on it, but there was nothing there. She spent ten minutes trying to locate the strangler before giving up – if it was there, it would have pounced by now. Was she starting to imagine things? How would Dawn cope – visions of her with a grey snake wrapped around her neck clouded Buffy’s mind, or held in the talons of the dragon, or beset by a patrol of demophants, or a Very Hungry Catermon. There was a reason they didn’t go out on their own.

When the sky turned dark grey again she had to give up, and returned to the cave, dejected. She couldn’t believe that after all she’d gone through to keep Dawn safe, it was Buffy who’d driven her away in the end. She made up the fire by herself, tossing some leftover berries and a piece of dogopede into a pot. Cooking on her own felt pointless, and she was empty and heavy inside.

There was a small sound from the entrance of the cave. Buffy looked up, reaching for her spear. There, in the opening, looking small and contrite, was Dawn, face streaked with dust, clothes torn, a small cut on her cheek. Buffy took three steps over and grabbed her and squeezed. She was sobbing into Dawn’s hair, but she didn’t care. Dawn squeezed back, almost as hard as Buffy, despite the lack of Slayer strength.

“You can’t run off like that,” Buffy said, through her tears. “That was really, really stupid.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Me too. I shouldn’t have said anything of that. I didn’t mean it.”

“I didn’t mean it either.”

They hugged and cried, until Dawn gave a yelp.

“The pot’s boiling over!”

They got the pot off and managed to salvage the contents, splitting the food.

“You can’t run off again,” Buffy said. “You have no idea how worried I was.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” Dawn said again. “Can’t we just install a door to the cave I can slam instead?”

Buffy gave her a relieved smile.

“I’ll do my best.”

They both knew it wasn’t going to happen – there wasn’t enough wood to go around, and neither of them had the carpentry skills that were needed, but it was nice to sit and joke about it with each other.

Mindful of her promise to Dawn, to look for a way home, they started to range further afield, looking for portals, or anyone the might have missed – if there were other humans here, or demon species that had magic that were friendly or could be threatened to open portals for them. They even risked staying the night outside the cave, keeping watch all through the night, so they could cover more ground. The scrublands stretched out far, almost as far as the dusty wasteland on their side of the mountains, and two days away they found a catermon nest nestled between two trees. They skirted around it, and weren’t bothered by the catermons. But they found no portals, no creatures they hadn’t already discovered. They weren’t giving up, though. She’d made a promise to Dawn, that they would get home, and she’d keep it, even if it seemed impossible right now.

They were half a day’s journey from the cave when they stumbled into a catermon. There was nowhere to hide – they were in wide open shrubland, and while Buffy and the catermons usually adopted a “live and let live” approach, it seemed this one was hungry. It reared up, its multicolored skin glittering even though there was no direct sun, its many legs skittering wildly. Buffy took the spear off her back and twirled it menacingly. Beside her, she saw Dawn ready her slingshot with one of the stones she kept in a pouch on her belt. They wouldn’t kill the catermon, but they’d slow it down a little, hopefully enough to give Buffy a chance to get up to it and engage it before it got to Dawn, and she had a knife if any of them came too close.

The fight was short, but intense. The catermon was surprisingly fast, despite its size, and it used its many legs to scratch and its mouth to spit acid at them. Dawn ended up needing to get her knife out when it came right up by her, scratching and spitting, and it was when Dawn jammed the knife in the soft parts between two of the bright natural armor plates that Buffy got the chance to stab her spear right through the top of its mouth, and it flopped down, dead.

“Do you think it’s good eating?” Dawn asked, and Buffy shrugged.

“Won’t know until we try.”

The catermon was half again the size of Buffy, and it would be a job and a half to drag it back to the cave. She considered if it was worth it – between them they could probably manage, but it would slow them down, and they weren’t that far from the demophant camp, and the demophants had shown time and time again that they were _not_ willing to adopt a “live and let live” approach to Buffy and Dawn.

She walked round it to where Dawn was. She was bleeding quite heavily from large scratch marks on her arm, and as Buffy tore yet another strip from her sweater, which by this point was more rag than shirt, Dawn smiled weakly.

“You don’t have to fuss, it’s not that bad.”

Buffy tutted. It wouldn’t be bad on her, but Dawn was not a Slayer.

“It’s fine, Buffy,” Dawn tried to reassure her. “Besides, chicks dig scars, right?”

Buffy froze for just a second in surprise, before she carried on trying the bandage round Dawn’s arm, hoping she hadn’t noticed. She wasn’t sure if this was Dawn obliquely coming out, or if it was her making light of the situation, but she made a mental not to tell Willow to talk to Dawn when they got back. Possibly also Tara, if Tara was able to string a full sentence together and have it be words all connected to each other. She hoped so – it seemed like Willow had successfully gotten Tara’s essence back from Glory during the fight, so she should be fine, right?

“Sure they do,” she said, making sure to match Dawn’s light, unconcerned tone of voice. “As a chick, I can confirm.”

Dawn smiled at her.

After that incident, Dawn decided that they would stop going so far to look for portals or magicians – it might be that she’d been frightened by the catermon attack, or it might be that she’d lost hope. Buffy wouldn’t have made the call on her own – she’d have kept looking forever if needs be, but she followed Dawn’s lead and they settled back into a routine, hunting, fetching water, dodging demophants, grey stranglers, the dragon, and everything else that wanted to kill them. They got on well for the most part, but they had their share of arguments, when Dawn’s humming got on her nerves, or when everything rubbed one of them the wrong way, but aside from that, they got on even better than in Sunnydale. They were more equal – Dawn pulled her own weight, and was more than Buffy’s little sister she had to protect. They divided the cave and specified a corner that was just for Dawn and one just for Buffy – going to their designated corner was the equivalent of withdrawing into their own room and closing the door, and it was understood that they’d only bother the other in their corner if it was truly important. The division did a lot to save their sisterly relationship, and to prevent either one of them from committing sororicide. Tempting as it may be at times.

It served them well whenever there was a dust storm, when the wind howled outside the cave, whipping up dust all around them, trapping them in the cave with cloth tied around their mouths. They were going stir crazy by the third day, with no idea of how long it would last. The longest a dust storm had lasted was five days – at least so far. Every time had the potential to set a new record, but god, Buffy hoped not. With no refrigeration and no salt, they were limited in how long food would last – their experiments with drying had gone better than smoking, but they still only had food for two or three days at a time, any longer than that and it would become an issue. Hunting in a storm was right out, so they had to ration food, eat the stuff that spoiled fastest first, and just hope for the best. At least the grey strangles didn’t venture out in this weather, so they were safe from them for the time being. Always something.

They made a set of playing cards using leftover bits of leather stolen from the demophants, since they needed to pass the time somehow during the dust storms, and they’d both learned how to play tic-tac-toe to a stalemate every time, which meant it was no longer fun. Dawn wanted to play abstract chess, where they drew and scratched out the position of all the pieces in the dust, but Buffy had neither the patience nor the strategic brain to think that many steps ahead. She was more of a tactics person, of the “see thing, slay thing” school of thought.

She was aware that they couldn’t just survive, they needed to live as well. She’d taken psych, she knew about Maslow’s hierarchy – they had the physiological needs just about met, they were so-so on safety and security, they had each other for belongingness and love, but they were still lacking the higher order needs –esteem and self-actualization. They weren’t the best they could be in this hellscape. She wasn’t quite sure where exactly in the pyramid playing cards fell, but they were important. Probably esteem, feeling of accomplishment, that sort of thing.

She was really glad the demophants had a functioning society who could treat animal skins to make leather. She supposed it might not be a bad idea to learn how to for themselves – they both desperately needed new clothes, and leather was good armor as well, but she had no idea how. She knew it involved animal urine at some point, and she did not want to go there. They weren’t that desperate – not yet. There would probably come a time when they were.

Buffy knew she was making long-term plans, that she was expecting them to stay in the hell dimension for years. She hadn’t given up on getting back home – she’d promised Dawn, but she didn’t know how long it would take, and they needed to survive until then. They needed to live. They needed to be at least somewhat sane when they did eventually get back.

She knew that might require some work. Both she and Dawn were hypervigilant, with always someone on watch, every flicker of a movement investigated to see if it was a strangler, and they had grown unhealthily co-dependent –she worried if Dawn was gone too long or if she couldn’t see her. It wasn’t ideal, and she worried about their mental state – especially Dawn, who was less resilient, and younger to boot – but that was a luxury for when they returned (and they would – she had promised Dawn). What was maladaptive in normal life was adaptive here – they had to have someone on watch, they had to react to every flicker of movement, it wasn’t safe to be out of sight from each other. Their hypervigilance made sense as a coping mechanism. They would probably have PTSD when they got back, but well. That was a problem for the future. They couldn’t have PTSD until they were post trauma.

Buffy woke up. She was in a dark, enclosed space, no light filtering in. Even their cave at night wasn’t pitch black – they always had a fire going, even if it was small, made up of twigs and shrubs rather than logs, but they kept it burning in case of grey stranglers. Dawn was on first watch, and she knew better than to let the fire go out. She wasn’t lying on her pelt, either, it was more even than the rocks they spread their pelts over, and softer. She reached out, and her hand touched wood, to the side of her, and above her. The air was thin, almost non-existent. Buffy pushed with all her might, both legs and arms, and the wooden roof gave way. Dirt tumbled in all over her, and it was still pitch black. She started digging, not knowing how far she had to go, or how long the breath in her lungs would hold. She dug, and dug, and dug. Eventually there was no more dirt above her, and she grabbed onto the ground and levered herself up. She clambered out of her grave, dirt under her fingernails, and took a deep breath filling her lungs with air, feeling the grass under her knees. She saw the gravestone with her own name on it – that was majorly freaky. And then, next to it, Dawn’s gravestone. Dawn. She wouldn’t have the strength to fight herself out of the grave, not with six feet of dirt on top of her. Buffy crawled over to Dawn’s grave and started digging frantically – she needed to get Dawn out before she suffocated in her coffin.

She kept digging down, in an inversion of how she had dug herself up, and when she got to the coffin, she yanked the lid up and pulled Dawn’s body up. She was loose and pliant in her arms, but made no movement. Buffy held her cheek above Dawn’s mouth and felt the faintest glimmer of a tickle as Dawn took shallow, weak breaths. She tipped Dawn’s mouth back, uncaring of the dirt around it, covered her nose and blew into the mouth. She wasn’t sure if Dawn needed CPR, but she’d give it, regardless.

A normal person would tire after a few minutes, but Buffy was no ordinary person, and soon Dawn’s breathing evened out and deepened, and her eyelids fluttered open. Buffy cradled her head as she blinked up at the stars in the deep blue sky, a color they hadn’t seen in months.

“Where are we?” Dawn asked and levered herself up so she was now sitting on her knees facing Buffy.

“We’re home, Dawnie. We’re home.”

They clung to each other on the familiar green lush grass of Sunnydale cemetery.


End file.
